The level of delusion and entitlement coming from people getting paid $160k (plus golden Cadillac benefits, fully covered) to work from home doing approximately 15 hours of real work a week is staggering.
I suppose its just proof of the hedonic treadmill at work.
Don't feel to bad, Spotify deleted all my saved content too, which I learned while on a trip out in the woods. My card didn't decline or expire, Spotifiy either updated and/or glitched and dumped everything along with any memory of what was downloaded.
Part of me thinks one of the big reasons Google has held back so much is because of ethical concerns and/or just general fear of not having complete knowledge of how AI (incomplete to boot) will impact the world. We know that Google has some extremely powerful AI, but they never let it out of the lab. Just the most heavily neutered and clamped versions to help accentuate their existing products.
Now it seems that Open.AI/Microsoft are ready to jump in, caution to the wind. As you would expect the chance for a competitive advantage will always overwhelm external concerns.
We'll see what Google does. They might say "fuck it" and finally give us a chance to play with whatever their top tier AI is. Or maybe they'll discredit it and try and compete with their current (ad optimized) search product. We'll see, but I am definitely curious to see how Google responds to all this.
There are a lot of people who just want privacy wherever they can get it. It's not necessarily something nefarious, but the result of the question "Does this person need to know who I am? No. Therefore there is nothing to gain and only something to lose by telling them."
I cancelled prime a few year ago and haven't looked back. Amazon has basically turned into a flea market chock full of counterfeit goods, goods of questionable origin, and a relentless "review optimization" schemes under the hood.
Recently my mother threw out a bunch of Christmas decorations because "they gave up the ghost". What had actually happened is she got counterfeit energizer batteries from amazon (which had 5-star reviews ofc). This story is not that big of a deal, but perfectly emblematic of the mess that is Amazon's store and hardly the only bad experience I have had with the junk they sell there.
Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. I suppose it's because people keep voting with their dollars for them to do nothing. Maybe now they'll start to think about it.
These models are infant technology. They are the chess playing computers of 1960.
It's completely missing the forest for the trees to call it out as useless. It's not meant to be useful right now, it's exploratory tech meant to feel out the space. Wait till it gets developed to hold it to some standard.
I should note though that progress has been far faster than computer chess. We went from "An AI wont beat a Go champion for at least 30 years" to "AI beats Go champion" in two years.
I mean, is the very situation you stated not a situation you are trying to solve? Would you stumble upon such a solution and bury it because AI isn't supposed to be more informed than experts?
Is there really something of value to be had by fighting a war against the coming tide of AI that can spit out whatever you ask for?
To me it looks like old world professors calling the council because the abacus is under threat by the calculator, and we need to ensure the students are absolutely not using the calculator for their abacus studies. This all being despite the fact that society at large is moving as fast as it can to leave the abacus for calculators.
I can't help that but feel that people have lost the forest for the trees. So transfixed on the small steps that they have completely lost track of why we take all those small steps, and the utility that they ultimately provide.
If you want to study whatever subject and become an expert, history or chemical engineering, cool, go ahead. I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.
I suppose its just proof of the hedonic treadmill at work.